I need to be smarter than the average LW user

To keep positive karma? Absolutely not. Upvotes are more frequent here than downvotes.

Articles are judged more harshly than comments, because there is the "does this deserve to be a separate article, instead of a comment in Open Thread?" factor. And karma gains/loses from an article are greater than from a comment.

Let me put it this way:

You wrote an article with strong questionable claims,
...that you admit are just random stuff which would work only through chance,
...and you also admit it is poorly written and edited,
...touching a politicized topic, which is kind of a taboo here,

...and your total karma is still positive, despite the losses from this article.

To me it seems that getting negative karma requires a lot of work. (Okay, we have a successful example in this very thread, but that is a rare situation.)